Samira Azzam

Samira Azzam (1927–1967) was born in Acre, Palestine. She was a teenager when her stories began to appear in the journal Falastin, under the pen name Fatat al-Sahel, or Girl of the Coast. After completing her basic education, she worked as a schoolteacher at 16, and was later appointed headmistress of a girls’ school. In 1948 she fled Palestine with her family to Lebanon, where she became a journalist. Azzam was an acclaimed Arabic translator of English-language classics by Pearl Buck, Sinclair Lewis, Somerset Maugham, Bernard Shaw, John Steinbeck, and Edith Wharton, among others. As ArabLit’s M. Lynx Qualey writes, “Azzam’s work came to prominence in the 1950s, at a time when Palestinian fiction was still focused on the short story.”